Chilean director Pablo Larrain has made quite a worldwide reputation for himself with a run of stylistically and narratively unique films — “Tony Manero,” “Post Mortem,” “No,” “The Club” — that often take unexpected looks at his country’s tortured history.

Now the 40-year-old filmmaker is unleashing the one-two punch of “Jackie” (opening Dec. 2) and “Neruda” (Dec. 16), both films about famous political figures at times of crisis in their lives.

His first English-language production, in which Natalie Portman portrays Jacqueline Kennedy at various moments before and after her husband John’s assassination, takes on memory and mythmaking in a compellingly intimate manner. “Neruda” presents a close-up portrait of Chile’s famed Communist poet and his image-building as well, but filtered through a sometimes surreal presentation of psychological speculation, mixed-up movie genres and Borgesian magical realism.

So, don’t call either of them biopics. Larrain sure doesn’t.

“What happens is that, can you really make a movie about somebody?” Larrain asks rhetorically. “I don’t think so. I just did two, and I tell you, I don’t think it’s actually possible to capture it. So that’s why, instead of attempting to go out and say this is who he or she was, we say this is what we found.

“What I tend to do is create a psychological space,” the filmmaker continues. “I do believe that cinema of course needs a good structure, good scripts, good character development, dramatic arcs and all that. But in the end, cinema is mostly made of atmosphere, a tone and a mood. That’s what I try to find, and once you get that you can probably use time in the way that you want and you can create a specific sensibility that’s on-screen throughout the world of other people.”

In the case of “Jackie,” Larrain admits that he had a superficial and stereotypical impression of the glamorous first lady before coming onto the movie project, which was written by Noah Oppenheim (“Allegiant,” “The Maze Runner”). Loosely based around a fictionalized magazine interview the widow gave a few weeks after JFK’s death, the movie zeroes in on both her emotional reaction to the tragedy and her growing resolve to steer the president’s memorial events toward burnishing the impression many have held of the Camelot White House since the events of 53 years ago.

“The script already had the interview and this take on six or seven days of her life,” notes Larrain, who also worked in information from an earlier televised tour of the White House Mrs. Kennedy conducted and that he became fascinated with. “That device let us explore slices of things: memories, emotions, feelings. The way we connected them was through an emotional perspective more than a narrative one. We knew the original facts of the story, but once we started working on it we looked for those emotional bridges between one time and another, which I guess was the biggest challenge.”

Interiors were meticulously re-created on Paris soundstages, with later shots of the funeral procession picked up in Washington, D.C. That had a lot to do with Portman living in France, and Larrain’s insistence that he would not make the movie with any other actress.

“I don’t know. Man, it’s hard to express, but how many biographies are out there about Mrs. Kennedy?” he asks. “A thousand? And how many articles and photos? It’s eternal, there are just so many ideas and so many opinions. But I don’t think anybody actually knew who she was. Once you assume that, you have to understand that there’s a great amount of mystery about her behavior. Not just because she protected her own privacy a lot, but also because she wouldn’t even know who she was.

“Natalie has that kind of mystery. Not only because she can be elegant and sophisticated and dangerous as an actress, and can perform in a way that you really believe you are looking at Jackie Kennedy. But also because she has that mystery in her eyes. That’s why there are so many close-ups in the film: She put herself at risk, somehow, and faced the character and the camera with a lot of determination and freedom at the same time.”

Larrain’s film about Pablo Neruda focuses on the Nobel literature laureate’s last days as a senator in Chile and his subsequent life in hiding before he escaped across the Argentine border after a U.S.-backed right wing government came to power in the late 1940s. Chilean television comedian Luis Gnecco (he starred in that country’s version of “The Office”) gained substantial weight to play the “champagne communist” who loved sex and partying as much as he did social justice, and Mexico’s Gael Garcia Bernal, who also starred in Larrain’s end-of-the-Pinochet-dictatorship era “No,” is Óscar Peluchonneau, the government detective on Neruda’s trail who has some pretty odd ideas about his relationship to the great man.

Elements of film noir, Freudian Westerns and other movie genres of the period flavor the political and character studies. That was no coincidence.

“It was the same thing as ‘Jackie’; I can’t take for granted that you know all the details,” Larrain explains. “So we have to tell the story in a way that people relate to it even if they’re not Latin Americans. I don’t take for granted that I know who Neruda was and I know his work, so I tried to make a movie that would survive without previous knowledge.

“It’s a movie about movies as well,” he says of “Neruda.” “I tried to find an identity in all of these multiple elements. Even though it’s very hard to bring poetry to the screen, you can find poetry in cinema, and that’s where it’s interesting to mix different sort of verses and identities of cinema. It’s also a movie where, at some point, characters are creating the other characters. I don’t think there’s another art form that can do that. It’s beautiful to see and assume that. It was interesting to put all of those elements into a blender and make this sort of juice that becomes a movie.”

The son of a right-wing politician, Larrain is uncertain whether his family background or his country’s tumultuous history are responsible for his making politically engaged films.

“Whatever my background is, cinema is always political, and I’m interested in it,” he reckons. “It’s hard for me to know how my family influenced that. I just do things, and it’s hard to analyze yourself like that. But I’d rather be conscious and understand that there will always be politics involved, and they’re important.

Bob Strauss has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.